Openings and Closings
Two visits a year decide how the rest of your season goes. A closing done correctly protects your plaster, your plumbing, and your equipment through a Colorado winter. An opening scheduled correctly means your pool is swimmable on the date you promised, not three weeks after.
The single most important thing on this page: book your opening early. Memorial Day is the biggest opening weekend of the year and we work first come, first served.
What A Closing Includes
A closing is predictable work, because by the time we close a pool it is already clean and chemically balanced from regular service. A standard closing includes:
· Blowing out and plugging the lines
· Draining the equipment so nothing holds water through a freeze
· Adding winterizing algaecide
· Covering the pool
A standard closing is billed as a flat base per body of water, with any additional time at our standard labor rate, plus parts and chemicals. Current rates are on our Pricing and Rates page.
While we are there, we are also noting equipment condition. A closing is the best time to catch a failing heater, a weeping seal, or a filter that needs media, because you have all winter to fix it instead of six days before your season opens.
Do not drain your pool for winter
This is the most expensive mistake we see, and it is a common misconception. Draining the pool for winterizing does not protect it.
It puts the most costly parts of the pool at risk.
Concrete and plaster pools. Plaster has to stay hydrated. Drop the water level and expose the finish to air and it dries out, shrinks, and develops stress fractures, which weakens the bond and shortens the life of the surface. Plaster is far and away the most expensive single component to replace in a pool, so it is the last thing you should gamble with. As for tile, ceramic pool tile does not crack or break simply because ice forms at the surface. Water at the tile line only becomes a problem where tile or grout is already missing and water can get behind it and then freeze, which will pop more tile off the wall. The fix for that is repairing the tile and grout, not lowering the water.
Fiberglass pools. An empty shell has nothing holding it down. When hydrostatic pressure from groundwater under and around the shell exceeds the weight of the water inside it, the shell can bow, bend, or crack. In extreme cases it floats out of the ground, rips itself out of the concrete deck, damages the plumbing, and totals the pool.
Vinyl liner pools. Drained too far, the liner loses the water pressure holding it stretched against the walls. It pulls out of the bead, usually starting in the corners, and then wrinkles or tears. Sometimes a liner can be repaired. Often it has to be replaced.
The bottom line: do not drain your pool during winterizing. If someone has told you otherwise, call us before anything comes out.
Why Openings are Unpredictable
Closings are routine because we know the pool. Openings are not, because until we get there we do not know what the winter did to the equipment, what the water looks like, or what condition the surfaces are in.
Openings routinely take more than one visit. Getting a pool from winter to swimmable often means repeated vacuuming, multiple backwashes, and several rounds of chemical adjustment as the water clears and stabilizes. Add any winter equipment failure we find and the timeline moves again.
That is why openings are quoted as a base plus additional time and materials rather than a flat number. The base rate and hourly labor are published on our Pricing and Rates page.
The scheduling reality, stated plainly
Memorial Day is the biggest pool opening weekend of the year. Everyone wants their pool open in early to mid May, and we work first come, first served.
Book between your closing and the end of the year. That is the window where the calendar is still open. If you have not booked your opening by early spring, you are working with what is left.
Weather controls whether an opening is even possible. It takes several weeks of temperate weather, around 60 degrees, for the layer of ice on the surface to fully melt before we can begin. No amount of scheduling changes that, which is another reason the calendar fills the way it does.
How our annual booking works
Every year we work to have the following season fully booked before December 31. Once the calendar is full, remaining spots are first come, first served, and openings we cannot take get turned down rather than promised.
So the practical timing is this. Book your next opening when we close the pool, or any time before the end of the year. If you are booking in the spring for a May open date, you are competing for whatever is left.
Commercial openings & Portfolio scheduling
For a facility, the opening date is not a preference, it is a commitment. Residents were told the pool opens Memorial Day weekend. The lease renewal packet says the pool is open. The summer program schedule is already published.
If you manage several properties, we sequence closings and openings across the portfolio and work backward from your season-open date, so the site with the most complex equipment or the highest bather load is not the one left until the last week. Every visit is documented in Skimmer with readings, a task checklist, photos, and a timestamp, emailed to you, which gives you a dated record that each pool was opened and brought to standard.
Openings are also when inspection issues surface. If you need an inspection-readiness pass before your facility opens to the public, see Compliance and Inspection Support. Winter is also the right time to do equipment replacement and renovation work, while the pool is closed and nobody is waiting on it. See Equipment Replacement and Renovations.
Start the Opening 1-2 months BEFORE your opening date
For a commercial facility, we recommend starting the opening one to two months ahead of your target open date. That is not padding. It is the time it takes to get a pool open, clean, chemically balanced, and heated, with any winter equipment failure found and repaired along the way.
A holiday weekend open date is the case that makes this obvious. If the residents were told the pool opens Memorial Day weekend, the work needs to start in April, not the week before, because a seized pump or a heater that will not fire is a parts order, not an afternoon.
Starting early also means the water is clear and the temperature is where guests expect it on day one, instead of the pool technically being open and nobody wanting to get in.
Get On The Schedule
Tell us how many bodies of water you have and the date you need them open. We will get you on the calendar and tell you honestly whether that date is realistic.